Soyinka cancels Anambra engagement in Solidiarity with Slain Jubrils

Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, yesterday, cancelled his scheduled engagement with Anambra State school, which was slated for August, in solidarity with the late Hariri Jubril, who was killed alongside her four children by yet-to-be identified gunmen in the state.

Soyinka in a statement, in Lagos, said the cold-blooded murder was not merely a national issue, but a violation of the much-touted values of the black race. 

“We must begin somewhere, ‘draw a line’ – however, individual and limited.  I totally repudiate the killing of guests of the unarmed, of innocents, the vulnerable, indeed, the murder of humanity.

“This time, I believe the decision is right, the moment compelling. In empathy with those innocents whose scholastic careers have been so brutally annulled, I serve notice of cancellation of that engagement with the Anambra School, scheduled for August.

“The deaths of those innocents cannot be reversed, but we must begin, even yesterday, the process of reversing the mental trajectory that makes death from innocence the current norm of national existence,” he said.
 
The nobel laureate said that at an event that he attended in the Abuja, he proposed the need to develop the collective sense of a lowest common denominator in the seizure of our humanity.

He said that any act that attempts to drag the country below, or remove that rung of the human ladder should be answered by a total community shutdown – or other equivalence – of its own accord, until that rung is fully reclaimed.

“The Anambra infanticidal orgy is one such. Deborah Samuel’s mob immolation was another. Response to such abominations transcends the mandatory functions of security agencies.  The act constitutes a breach in community ramparts and should be answered by collective action.

“Again, I insist that it is long past time to move beyond pious denunciations – essential, yes, but insufficient.  We simply must devise ways of making our revulsion so stark, unambiguous, and inclusive. Only then will such pollutants of civic consciousness be brought to rethink, come to understand that it is not just the immediate family, friends and colleagues whose humanity is thus violated, but the totality of cohabitants.”

Soyinka said that he admitted in Abuja, that he nearly cancelled the engagement as an expression of that revulsion, and in solidarity with the bereaved, adding that in the end, he decided that it would not be the right gesture. 

“It so happens that I also have an engagement in Anambra, at a school where, for all I know, the children of Mr. Jibril Ahmed were enrolled, or would soon be enrolled, a sanctuary of learning for the one yet in the womb of the murdered Harira.  It need not have been that very institution, but it is to just such a place of creative formation that they were all innately predetermined,”